Copy/paste from pdf

[jmignot]

Hi,
Perhaps this was asked previously but this forum has grown so huge!…
I am trying to copy grammar sentences from pdf lesson files to enter them into a "scheduled reviewing sorfware" (Anki), but all I get is gibberish. Yet AcroRead says there is no special protection turned on there, so it must have to do with character encoding, fonts, or whatever. Could not find how to fix it tho…
Can anybody help?

Thanks

Jean-Michel

[Psy]

Hi,
Perhaps this was asked previously but this forum has grown so huge!…
I am trying to copy grammar sentences from pdf lesson files to enter them into a "scheduled reviewing sorfware" (Anki), but all I get is gibberish. Yet AcroRead says there is no special protection turned on there, so it must have to do with character encoding, fonts, or whatever. Could not find how to fix it tho…
Can anybody help?

Thanks

Jean-Michel

The only suggestions I have are:

Mac: Get BBEdit lite, copy/paste the text into a new document, and then experiment by saving with different encodings.

Win: Copy into Notepad, save-as and choose UTF-8. Open the document in your web browser and copy/paste into Anki.

Encoding is a pain to deal with... I've not yet been able to find any solid solutions to it. Still, occasionally the above will work for me when I run into problems, so maybe it will help you!

[jmignot]

Thanks for this hint. Unfortunately I have already tried it but it did not work. Admittedly I have not checked all possible encodings. I would guess some techies at JPod must know the answer to this question. If anybody is listening…

[kitsu]

Seconded on the support request. For now I can just use JWPce to manually type and transfer into Anki, but it would be nice to have a quicker way to add vocab from lessons into your deck.

[Eran]

Thanks for your inquiry. Unfortunately, this is due to a technical limitation having to do with the way fonts are embedded in our dynamically generated PDF documents. Currently only a subset of the original font, containing only the glyphs used, is embedded in the output document. This embedded font contains only the minimum data needed to be embedded in a PDF document, and does not contain any codepage information. The PDF document contains indexes to the glyphs in the font instead of to encoded characters. While the document will be displayed correctly, the net effect of this is that searching, indexing, and cut-and-paste will not work properly.

We are searching for ways to overcome this, but at the moment have not found a solution that would work without making the size of the PDF files HUGE! One way to overcome this is to copy the text from our Line-By-Line transcripts in the Learning Center if you're a Premium member.

[kitsu]

I figured it was something like that. We have a similar problem here at my work with drawing files, we only found the problem when opening the generated pdfs in Adobe Illustrator though. I know in Illustrator there is an option about how to embed fonts in saved pdfs, but I'm sure nobody wants to make these things in Illustrator though

I just did some searching and it seems like installing acrobats Japanese font extension pack should allow everything to work correctly. I tried it just now but I don't have the right privileges on these work computers. I'll try again when I get home but here is a link so other people can try:

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/acrrasianfontpack.html

BTW, the way they are made now the pdfs should work even if you don't have any east asian fonts available on your computer right? I wonder why the pdfs don't work on the iphone/ipodtouch?